Kevin Paquette: Quebec Conservative Éric Duhaime’s moment is here

Quebec Conservative Party leader Éric Duhaime on Tuesday, August 18, 2026. Photo by Allen McInnis /Montreal Gazette

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In the 2022 Quebec election, Éric Duhaime’s Conservative party received nearly 13 per cent of the vote and more than half a million ballots, yet failed to elect a single member to the National Assembly. Duhaime himself lost his riding. Normally, that kind of result sends a political party back to the margins, especially in a system where much of an opposition leader’s visibility comes from question period, parliamentary committees and a caucus generating daily media coverage.

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Four years later, the Conservatives are still here. Duhaime has managed to retain much of his 2022 support and has even gained ground in recent polling, despite spending most of that time outside the legislature. More importantly, he has influenced the political debate from the outside. His message has remained fairly consistent: lower taxes, a smaller and more efficient state, less regulation and greater individual responsibility. Issues other parties could once afford to ignore have moved closer to the centre of provincial politics.

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The most obvious example came last fall. With the CAQ sinking in the polls, François Legault shifted his government noticeably to the right, placing greater emphasis on law and order, state efficiency, reforming union legislation, national identity and social cohesion. The political calculation was easy to understand. Many of the voters the CAQ was trying to recover had once belonged to Legault’s coalition but were increasingly attracted to Duhaime. The problem for the CAQ was equally obvious: after seven years in power, borrowing the language of an opponent risks convincing voters to choose the original instead.

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The Parti Québécois presents a different case. No one could mistake Paul St-Pierre Plamondon for a classical liberal. The PQ continues to view the Quebec state as an essential instrument of national power. Yet its vocabulary has also changed. The party now talks openly about government efficiency, reducing bureaucracy, questioning certain state structures and lowering parts of the tax burden. During much of the CAQ era, Quebec politics focused less on how large government had become than on what government should do next. Duhaime has helped reopen that debate.

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That conversation is not exclusively economic either. In Quebec, language, culture and national identity are ultimately questions about what a society wants to preserve and pass on. Those instincts can fit naturally within a conservative worldview alongside attachment to family, personal responsibility and community. Duhaime has often spoken about moving Quebec’s Overton window. It is a somewhat academic expression for a fairly simple political objective: make ideas that once seemed marginal respectable enough that your opponents eventually have to address them.